CIRCA 2ND CENTURY A.D.

The goddess is depicted standing with her weight on her right leg, the left leg bent at the knee and with a slight twist to her torso. Her arms are bent at the elbows and in her left hand she holds a mirror; with her right hand, her thumb and index fingers touch. Above her center-party wavy hair is a radiating foliate crown. As C. Kondoleon and P.C. Segal remark (p. 206 in Aphrodite and the Gods of Love), small bronze figures of Venus, such as the present example, could have functioned as either cult offerings or household objects used for private devotional use.

It is possible that a portion of the crown, now missing, was surmounted with long plumes, thus associating this bronze with the syncretistic goddess Isis-Aphrodite, who combined the qualities of fertility associated with Aphrodite and the elements of rebirth connected to Isis. In his 1905 catalogue of the de Clercq Collection, de Ridder (op. cit.) thought that the crown might have supported a “coiffure isiaque.”